Though she’d never show it, Wreave relaxed as the girl acceded to her wishes. She judged herself a fairly competent judge of human mood and character, it was what she’d been made for after all, but she was all too aware that hubris could stalk anyone’s steps. Still, so far, affairs were running according to her improvised script, so there was no sense to stop now.
“Come along,” she said, making sure to add a dash of grandeur to the motion. If she was going to play this out as partners in a scheme, she’d need to establish herself in the lead. She threw open the doors of the attuner’s temple, carefully placed dust flying off to catch the light from the sky above. Inside, grand stone-wrought animals frolicked through a forest etched in granite, windows cut in the ceiling to simulate light filtering through a forest canopy. Wreave only paid the scene a passing mind, having long since dismissed it as general frippery.
She proceeded through the foyer to the second set of doors at the back, her additional watch-eyes noticing Sorana still sitting stunned at the entryway. Wreave made good use of the time to open the rear doors before Sorana would be able to look inside, shutting them quietly behind herself. In the rear chamber, she found a similarly grandiose vault of stone carved forest, though instead of carved roots across the floor, she found a thin layer of black oil covering everything. She fought the urge to shoot it a glare.
“What are you still doing here?” she asked, managing to keep a hiss from her voice. To be frank, she wasn’t entirely surprised, she was dealing with the Shaper after all.
“Oh, uh…” The oil pulled itself together, molding into a vaguely upright shape, a semi-lupine head forming at the top, a great yellow and red eye appearing held in its jaws. “So, I’ve actually been looking for you all morning, but I wasn’t sure where you’d gone, and—”
She cut him off with a quick wave of her lower arm, fighting the urge to devote the rest to rubbing her temples. “What went wrong?”
“I can’t get it,” the Shaper said, blissfully cutting to the chase for once.
“What do—” Wreave cut herself off. She hated stupid questions, and they didn’t come much dumber than ‘what do you mean you can’t get it?’ “What went wrong?”
“Metaphor or specifics?” the Shaper asked.
“Metaphor,” Wreave said.
“Imagine you’re trying to unweave a rug as a loom weaves it. Now make the loom weave at the speed of sound.” He shook his head. “The cancer has cancer down there. You’ve got living things that have been spliced and re-spliced so many times that they’re practically genetic noise. And that’s just the majority of it. I’ve counted at least three species that have settled into some sort of meta-perfect design.” He sniffed. “I’d be impressed if their aesthetics weren’t so offensive.”
Wreave allowed herself a forehead rub. “I need that attuner, Sphear.”
He flinched at the use of his true name and shot her a sour look. “Look, you don’t need that attuner. I can do everything it can, but better. So I will.”
“Can you now?” She asked, the accusation plain.
“Yes!” he literally bristled, surface turning jagged and spiked. “Right now, that thing has a whole planet’s worth of power to pump through. It’s not a question of ability, but of power.” He snorted. “If I bought over a moon or two I could have it wrenched out in the next five minutes. Shall I?”
“No, no.” Wreave heaved a sigh. It looked like she wasn’t going to get her way, but then she never really did with the Shaper. “You can do the same job?”
“I can do better.” He formed a tentacle out of his mass, and at the tip of it held a what appeared to be a polished sphere of sunlight. Despite not being bright enough to be blinding, Wreave could feel the distinct warmth of direct sunshine on her fur. She nodded briefly, it was certainly impressive enough for her purposes.
As she observed the orb, her watch-eyes spotted the doors behind her beginning to open. She ran some quick social arithmetic in her head. While the Shaper would certainly be disconcerting to her agent, being seen keeping secrets would be disastrous. Instead adopting a policy of utter indifference, she allowed the door to open.
-=-=-=-
Sorana was awestruck. She’d never actually been inside a temple before, the temple in Ivoth being restricted to the inner-city. The most she’d ever seen were the gleaming spires, clad in iron like the warriors the church fostered. While she’d dreamed of grand frescos and vaulting ceilings, the reality of it still took her breath away. She found herself running her fingers along the walls, as pristine as if they’d been carved yesterday, the etchings so detailed she could feel the fur on the deer as she caressed them.
As her eyes wandered down the great chamber, she discerned a pattern. At the entrance, the animals were all normal forest animals. As they went inward, however, they became greater, grander. Foxes the size of deer, badgers as big as a wagon. Then further still they became elegant mixtures, antlered rabbits and winged snakes. Finally, framing the great doors at the back, two wildfolk stood together, their joined hands forming the arch of the door, a wolf eared and tailed girl on the left, a feathered and serpent bodied man on the right, serene and perfect.
Sorana wasn’t sure what she should do. She felt like she should do something, but the temple had always been a distant thing to her, the wildfolk doubly so. Even in Ivoth, a town that prided itself on its equality, wildfolk remained a breed apart, forever a half-step above their common kin. Always faster, always stronger, and always more beautiful, the distant children of Aravon. At last she decided to kneel, bowing her head to the great archway. To think she would play a part in bringing back that age, even if it was a somewhat fraudulent part.
It was only as she came back to herself that she noticed the creature had gone missing. A corner of her mind felt it had seen her go towards the rear doors, but those were now closed. As she approached, she faintly heard the noise of talking on the other side. Slowly, she pushed her hand to the door and opened it.
The first thing that surprised her was the feel of warm sunlight spilling across her. The light itself wasn’t blinding, but she was instantly reminded of summers spent running through the fields outside Ivoth, away from the press of the crowds and the hard cobblestones, the soft earth underfoot and the sun shining in the sky. As her focus drifted away from the sphere, however, it settled on the thing of twisting shadows that held it.
“Oh, hello.” the thing said, baleful eye flicking to her, before returning to the creature. “Is she your agent, Wreave?”
“Yes,” the creature called Wreave replied. “Sorana, this is the Shaper. Shaper, Sorana.”
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“I—” Sorana fought the urge to jump as the shadow thing drifted over to her, its torso of a body simply floating over the ground, massive eye scrutinizing her.
It somehow managed to heave a sigh even with the eye in its mouth. “Terran template, as ever. Still, I can work with this.” The eye flicked up to meet her gaze, moving from scrutinizing her body to her soul. “Do you wish to be here?”
“I— what?” She blinked, still fighting the urge to reel back.
“He wishes to know if you want to be here,” Wreave said. “The Shaper is ever obsessed with things being in harmony with their nature.”
“Using a whisk as a doorstop would offend a chef, I don’t see why it should be any different with living things,” the Shaper said, before turning back to Sorana. “You have a right to be a person, not a soldier or a hero or some other social implement for the betterment of a mindless communal construct.”
She could only stare blankly at him, much of his statement sailing clearly over her head.
“Do you want to be here?” Wreave said. “That’s the simple way to put it.”
Sorana thought about the question for a minute. She thought she could suss out something from what the Shaper had said. She thought of the soldiers she had seen, stuck at their guard posts, the otherwise pleasant sun beating down on them day after day. She thought of her life as a baker, the quiet, stifling feeling of looking at her parents, her brothers, and feeling as trapped within that quiet little shop as if she’d been in a dungeon. She thought of the dark, winding forest she had braved, and how, even dying, she had felt more alive than she had her whole life.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to be here.”
“Well, that’s good enough for me!” He smiled broadly, before lifting up the orb of light. “Now look closely.”
She did so, but before her curiosity could drag another question from her, light filled the world.
-=-=-=-
Wreave watched as Sorana’s eyes glazed over and the girl went perfectly still. Light seemed to spill from the orb, growing solid, weaving around her like threads, slowly forming a cocoon around her. The whole process only took a few seconds, yet Wreave could not shake her irritation at the ostentation of it. “Must it be so… flashy?”
“I tried it without the special effects,” the Shaper said. “It, uh, wasn’t pleasant to look at. I don’t think you’d get the accolades you desired if your ‘gift’ to the people made everyone in eyeshot vomit.”
“Fair,” she swallowed her irritation. “Something still needs to be done about the real attuner though.”
“Actually no.” Wreave raised an eyebrow, and the Shaper continued. “Nightmarish as it is down in the roots of this place, the attuner has managed to create a sort of benign homeostasis. It doesn’t have the resources to expand, and the area around the attuner itself has turned into a closed, self-cannibalizing ecosystem. It’s basically encysted itself from the world.” He shrugged. “I can’t get in, but nothing can get out either. Frankly, moving it at this point would be better grounds for a catastrophe than leaving it.”
Wreave clicked her tongue. “How am I supposed to explain the forest then? If she recovers the attuner, people are going to expect the forest to wither away and die.”
“Then people are stupid,” the Shaper said. “The forest isn’t a direct product of the attuner anymore. Grab a twistwood seed and plant it halfway across the world, and it’ll grow into a twistwood. The attuner made them, but they’re getting by on their own now. Same with the spider-wolves, they’re reproductively viable and effective. They’re here to stay.”
Wreave tapped her talons on the floor. It was unpleasant to hear, but she couldn’t say she was entirely surprised. She’d suspected as much might be the case, but given the myriad ways magic could work on any given world, it had been a distinct hope the whole problem would just evaporate on its own. Still, she was no stranger to bad luck. Nothing for it.
“Well,” the Shaper said. “If that’s everything, I’ll be off then.”
Wreave considered for a moment. Briefly, she considered having him pass word down into the Vault, but she quickly discarded the idea. She was as likely to wake something helpful as something harmful from there, and for the moment she had no reason to believe Sorana would be insufficient to the task. No sense gambling on interference yet. “That’s everything. Will you be returning to the Crucible?”
“Yep! This place has given me a few new ideas.” The Shaper’s form shifted, tentacles reaching into himself and withdrawing components and tools from his inky depths, beginning to assemble a device on the spot. “Want to give them a try.”
“Very well,” Wreave said. “Will it still be at the same coordinates?”
“Yes. I think I’ve got the Liminal Desert just how I like it. I might change the sand color again, but I keep going back to that nice sandstone red.” He paused, shaking his head. “Not trying black again. That was a disaster. Looked cool though.”
“I’m glad I can return without risk of spontaneously combusting,” She said.
“You’re always welcome back in the Vault,” he offered, looking over the contraption he’d built, a strange booth with glass walls and some sort of number pad and handset within.
“Maybe when my work is done,” she said. “There’s still much to do here.”
“I know, but sometimes such things are nice to hear.” He favored her with a smile. “Even for you.”
She inclined her head gently. “Thank you.”
He pulled open the booth door, floated in, and closed it, taking the handset off the pad and entering a sequence of numbers. With a casual wave through the glass, the whole contraption vanished beyond space and time.
Alone, Wreave sighed. A part of her was forever irked by the endless ‘silliness’ he engaged in. For all that she appreciated that such memetic showmanship was important to ancient beings like the Shaper, relics as prized as any sword or urn, they so often reeked of absurdity. On such matters, she turned her attention back to the golden egg that sat upon the ground, a similar show of absurd frippery.
Belatedly, she realized she’d forgotten to ask the Shaper how long Sorana would be out of commission.
Once again, Wreave sighed.